With these "extreme tales," Harold Jaffe has
produced, through narrative, dialectic, slapstick, collage, and
tabloid virtuosity, the thing that couldn't be: a definitive satire
of the world culture of the 1990's. At least that's one possible
view of a book that shifts perceivably under scrutiny. Reading
this book was an event not unlike discovering a new stage of
particle-wave theory; having mastered the concept that one can
either view the wave or a particle, but not both simultaneously,
you look down and see that the little suckers have begun to do
a can-can and now you have no recourse but to view both simultaneously.
It's cartoon realism and social cannibalism, guerrilla comedy
bedroom farce, absolutely outrageously yet uncannily accurate
dialogue, dialectic shaped by a collective consciousness formed
by decades of reading Plato for the sexy parts and watching Jerry
Springer for the truth - all activities executed in the pursuit
of finding a way to relinquish control and/or punish the sinful
while achieving the most possible pleasure, depending, as someone
offers at the conclusion of the title tract and the book, "on
the viewer-consumer's net income, high-tech savvy and devotion
to the program, right?" By asking that question, though,
it's clear that someone has missed the point.

Typical characters in a Jaffe tale are desperately seeking
a radical redefinition through means readily available in the
surrounding consumer culture, the material of which is usually
insulating them from the dangerous forces which attract them - the
stuff dreams and tabloid TV are made of. Serial killers in particular
have been raised to a mythic, almost heroic status, as has cockatoo-loving
dress-wearing Dennis Rodman (the cover model) and a cancer-ridden
victim-turned-avenger acting on his every fantasy, including
the "ethical murder" of a disagreeable corporate frontman.

The serial killer is the Jaffe cultural icon par excellence.
Those who remember Geraldo's infamous "man-to-man" talk
with Charles Manson (evoked in this book) will appreciate
the symbiosis between these holocaustic media stars and the public
which vainly attempts to read meaning into their actions. The
only way of finding it is to merge with the killers as victim,
but there are no passive victims here (passivity being itself
a role or pretense), just a range of screwed-up courtship dances
that would confuse and confront the identities of all concerned.
Most of these, like any TV-movie-of-the-week worth two stars,
are based in some vestige of the "real world" as framed
by contemporary media - such as the jail pen-pal romances of mass
murderers or the seemingly spontaneous explosion of sexual deviancy
in an innocuous suburban family.

Other scenarios include a coffee-guzzling yuppie who revises
his meeting with a dominatrix into a sale of a thigh-and-butt
suppressor, a vampire who's learning to serve the needs of humanity,
a Howard Sternish shockjock who's fooled by extreme tales of
sex in Madison Square Garden, a Barbara Walterish interview of
a boy who kills his mom after sex and cuts her into little pieces
(and then is sorry, sort of), a horny new-age Buddhist at his
first S & M orgy, and so on. There are also transsexual
cowboys, magenta anal plugs, Brazilian snuff films produced by
Disney Plus, and much, much more. As Goldie Hawn says to Dudley
Moore in Foul Play, "I never knew there was so much
diversity." Jaffe is clearly playing with not only every
convention of hard-core pornography, tabloid journalism, and Internet
usenet-groups/relay chat, but the academic conventions of post-modern
jargon as well. The result is more stunning (and at times numbing)
than merely humorous. Reading "A Modest Proposal" in 1720
must have been like this.

"Her son was her sun," offers an analytical inquirer
about one character who is caught in an affair with her teenage
child, an observation that makes more sense than most in Sex
For The Millennium. In all these fictions, characters are
seeking the sun, but as the inquisition points out, according
to some media sources, "The sun used to be nourishing. Now
it is poisonous." Reliance on a sophistic rhetoric unrelated
to one's own experiences will simply limit experience - narrow
it to this symbiotic fascination with those who suck poison
out of the sun, the apparent survivors of an
invisible holocaust that creates an elite of serial
killers while consigning the preterite to popping Viagra and
espresso as they view Jenny Jones. Reading Sex For the
Millennium is not a soothing experience, but don't take my word
for it. The only point you'll get out of this book is the one you
stick in yourself.